Google’s Marissa Mayer believes real-time searching could change the way we navigate the internet
Don’t let Marissa Mayer worry you, but she would like your camera, phone and surroundings to tell Google a bit more about you and the world around you – and do it more often. As vice-president of “search product and user experience” at the search giant, she thinks we’ve only just got started on search – and that sensors, such as those built into those objects you may own, are the way forward.
Presently, search is limited to what is strictly online, put there by people: “What we offer today is very different from, say, [what] a friend of yours who might have access to a lot of facts or information [could], so the interaction is a lot less human and prompt and responsive,” she explains. The first stage of search involved text on web pages; the second stage, which we’re in now, does involve humans, who are helping identify images and adding context to web pages, which makes the web appear knowledgeable.
Mayer, 34, gives an example of the latter: “We’re starting to see things [in search] that appear intelligent but actually aren’t semantically intelligent. So, for example, if you type GM into Google, you’ll probably get General Motors. But if you type GM foods, we actually give you pages about genetically modified foods and General Mills [the US food company that was a key player in the GM debate].”
But there’s a potential third form of search, she explains, which uses the sensors built into devices around us. “I think that some of the smartphones are doing a lot of the work for us: by having cameras they already have eyes; by having GPS they know where they are; by having things like accelerometers they know how you’re holding them.”
Buildings and infrastructure typically have sensors built in too. Strain gauges on bridges tell how well they are handling the stresses of their everyday existence; there are temperature sensors on cars, while rain gauges and gas samplers at any location will give you a picture of the world.
Real-time revelations
Which leads us to real-time search – a space where Twitter, in particular, has pulled ahead of the bigger company. Although it’s emphatically unsaid, it’s clear from studying the reactions of Mayer – and other senior people at Google – that the little company has unsettled its bigger, broader rival.
Of course Google had its own attempt at real-time many-to-many messaging: Jaiku, which it bought in October 2007. But Twitter was already riding the rising wave, and Jaiku quickly fell by the wayside; its developers open-sourced the code in March and have moved on to other things. Which, until those phones, cameras and gauges start announcing their data over the web, doesn’t leave many sources of real-time information.
Mayer acknowledges as much while hymning the virtues of the idea: “We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.”
Spot it? “Tweets”. It’s the only time in the conversation, and the half-hour talk Mayer later gives to an audience of entrepreneurs, where she mentions by name any rival product or brand. (General Motors and General Mills are illustrative, though she does mention Apple and the iPhone – though you’d hardly call it a rival.) She never says Microsoft or Bing or Internet Explorer when asked about the rival’s search or about browsing. Tweets implies Twitter, the company Google is often expected to be sniffing around to replace its missed chance with Jaiku.
Making tweet music together?
So is Google talking to Twitter about integrating real-time search, which Twitter got by buying Summize last year? “I can’t comment on any discussions that we may or may not be having between the companies,” Mayer stonewalls. “I can say that we think that real-time search is very interesting.”
Mayer would know. She’s a key player at Google: one of its earliest employees, who talks about her sense of wonder at how it has grown. “I went to this year’s Google summer picnic and there were more people in the queues than were in the company when I joined it.”But the company tries to keep its teams small: “by keeping smaller you avoid a lot of that bureaucracy that tends to snuff out an idea early.”
But there’s also the fact that Google is stuffed full of people who just love to experiment on its users. For instance, Google Mail uses a very slightly different blue for links than the main search page. Its engineers wondered: would that change the ratio of clickthroughs? Is there an “ideal” blue that encourages clicks? To find out, incoming users were randomly assigned between 40 different shades of links – from blue-with-green-ish to blue-with-blue-ish. It turned out blue-ness encouraged clicks more than green-ness. Who would have guessed? And who would have cared? Google, of course, which wants to get people clicking around the net.
Clicking, of course, ideally using its browser, Chrome, launched last year. Launched why? “Our engineers noticed that browsers didn’t seem to be evolving very much any more. No one was paying any attention to Javascript, even though pages were using more and more Javascript.” Chrome focuses on running Javascript (such as you find in Google products..) really quickly.
So has it lived up to expectations? “Ah, very much so. Our user base is growing very quickly.” What were those expectations? “We have our goals in terms of users, numbers of versions.” And has it met them? “Yes.” Exceeded them? “It’s been pretty much on par. We’ve become pretty good at predicting how users will respond to something with original installs and downloads.”
Recognition factor
And finally – given that she studied artificial intelligence at university – is she surprised by how slowly image recognition (and accompanied search) has evolved, given the effort put into it, compared to voice recognition? After all, Google Image still asks for human help. Why haven’t the computers figured it out yet?
“For voice, language is language. Sometimes a new word crops up and then you have to figure out how to recognise that. With images, the problem is fundamentally changed. Twenty years ago, all you needed to do was be able to recognise the million celebrities who are likely to show up on the evening news. Now, with the dawn of YouTube and digital photography and 100bn images being uploaded to the web every year, you actually need to be able to identify all 6 billion people. The problem is that in those 6 billion people there’s an awful lot of people who look a lot like Tony Blair or Cindy Crawford.”
What’s also lost in a still photo is the contextual information – movement, location, voice – that reality offers. “With a still image all you have are the pixels, and those pixels might look a lot like a photo of someone else, so I do feel for the image recognition people because their problem has become significantly harder in the internet age. We’re not getting closer to a solution. tThe solution just moves further away.”
Indeed, the areas of success are where photos get metadata – geotagging – or where humans help: “You take one picture of your family at Christmas and tag this little red spot as ‘Meredith’, and the system says: ‘Every time we see something that’s the same shade of red intensity, in all of their pictures, those are Meredith.’ A lot of people think that’s cheating, but I don’t really think it is because that’s what humans do.
“So, image recognition is really trying to harness those things; and the sensor revolution we’re seeing – GPS that’s attached to your phone, to a camera – really can help us develop image technologies that work a lot better. It means we make the problem simpler.”
(The full text of the interview on which this article is based can be read here.)
The birth of Twitter art
In a Manchester parade and on a London plinth a new era in British culture is taking shape
In the past seven days two extraordinary events have taken place that define a new way forward in British cultural and artistic life. The first was a parade commissioned by the Manchester international festival from Jeremy Deller, who won the 2004 Turner prize. Deller – whose art is characterised by his enabling, rather than authoring, pieces of work – was no Pied Piper, leading the people through the streets of Manchester. Instead, this was a procession created (notwithstanding the fact that Deller had spent a meticulous year working with its participants) by the citizens themselves. This was a procession that gave dignity to individual creativity in places where it is not usually recognised, whether from the teenage goths and emos who paraded glumly down Deansgate, or the impressive Hindu piping band from Bolton in full Scots regalia.
The second event will probably prove even more epoch-defining. This is One and Other, Antony Gormley’s 100-day work that launched on Monday and sees ordinary members of the public occupy the empty plinth in the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square. Anyone can apply, and be selected by computer, to take their hour on the plinth; and, within reason, they can do what they like when they are up there.
Gormley talks of creating a composite picture of Britain as we are today. He has no plans to appear on the plinth himself, and this is a work that has been colonised by its participants and observers in a way that I suspect even Gormley would not have anticipated. Speaking with Sir Nicholas Serota at the London School of Economics on Tuesday, Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, called One and Other “Twitter art”. He is right. Not only does the form of the piece share characteristics with internet social networking in its creation of public personae for private citizens, but, in a quite unprecedented way for a work of art, One and Other is being documented online on sites such as Twitter – where its popularity as a subject for discussion this week effortlessly outstripped that of Big Brother.
The idea that a work of contemporary art – and it is notable just how few people seem to have questioned its status as such – should have attracted public enthusiasm on this scale would have been unthinkable 20, even 10 years ago. Among the crowds gazing at the plinth on Monday morning, a Russian woman turned to me and observed that the British must indeed trust their citizens “not to go up there with a gun, or something”. Well indeed; One and Other, it seemed to me that morning, could happen only in Britain. It seemed impossible to imagine it happening in Washington or Paris, Beijing or Moscow.
Why? The answer, as Serota and MacGregor pointed out, is partly down to the unique place of the arts and culture in British life. Take museums: in no other country is the idea of their ownership by the public, their status as a part of civic life, their role as the places we go to examine ourselves and the world, so strong. It is the deep-rooted idea that our national museums and our arts are the property of the people that has led to the widespread embracing of One and Other. Woe betide the government that attempts to introduce arts spending cuts.
Cultural leaders and policymakers need to grasp the mood that One and Other is heralding. Bill Ivey, who ran Barack Obama’s transition team on culture and whose intellectual background is as a folklorist, is the key contributor to Expressive Lives, a pamphlet published this week by the thinktank Demos. In it, he lays out the notion that ideas about culture could usefully be rethought in terms of what he calls the “expressive life”. Part of this is about according dignity to the everyday creativity of ordinary lives; in political terms, its corollary could be to angle policy away from how institutions grandly “provide” arts and culture to the masses, and to think about how citizens exist in a cultural ecology in which their own expressive gestures take on new importance.
It is not only about museums rethinking their relationships with audiences and, as Serota and MacGregor predicted on Tuesday, becoming more like multimedia publishers or broadcasters. One might also think about what the sociologist Richard Sennett has discussed in his book The Craftsman, which charts the “enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake” – celebrating the often overlooked, pain- staking, creative jobs of hand and eye, once the province of guildsmen’s workshops, now as likely to be found in software designers’ offices. Just as important as the web is individuals valuing and taking control of their own expressive and inner lives in other ways, whether that involves stitching a shirt, learning to play a musical instrument – or spending an hour on the fourth plinth.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief arts writer; she blogs at guardian.co.uk/charlottehiggins